Jacob Wrestling with the Angel
Artist Hans Feibusch
Accession number 2013-f3
Having gained a family, livestock and wealth in Paddan-aram, Jacob leaves his adoptive home and returns to Canaan, the home and brother that he had left. He is in mental and emotional turmoil as he readies himself to meet again with the brother that he wronged. In his anguish, he has an experience during the night of wrestling with an angel. He stands his ground and holds on, as has been the case, through his life. His assailant, seeing he cannot prevail, injures him before blessing him. Jacob, who is renamed Israel, contends with God and prevails. His experience of wrestling with God seems to symbolise the internal struggle he faced as he prepared to try to reconcile with the brother he wronged. Following his night-long wrestle, Jacob meets Esau and the two are reconciled.
Feibusch captures something of the stubborn holding on demonstrated by Jacob in his conflicted situation which, ultimately, enables him to survive and thrive. His feet are firmly planted on the ground while the angel is raised off the ground; whether by Jacob himself or as a means to try to over-throw Jacob is unclear. His body is lit by the rising sun revealing that he is has come through this night of doubt and sorrow, while his assailant remains in the blue light of the moon. This image is, therefore, symptomatic of the resolve required to leave home and family in order to make a new life elsewhere and of the conflicted relationship with home which then often and, perhaps inevitably, occurs.
This painting illustrates a scene from the biblical Book of Genesis in which Jacob, travelling alone upon his return to Canaan, wrestles all night on the side of a riverbank with an opponent in the form of an Angel. As morning approaches, Jacob agrees to let his opponent go on the condition that he blesses him first and the angel gives him the name Israel, meaning ‘the one who strived with God and has prevailed’. Feibusch first exhibited a work of this title in his first British solo exhibition at the prestigious Lefevre Galleries in Mayfair in 1934. In this later version, the angel seems poised between struggle and embrace. It is one of a series of five oil paintings on Old Testament subjects that together explore issues of faith, sacrifice, courage, love, and redemption, originally commissioned by Rabbi Hugo Gryn for the Stern Hall in the West London Synagogue in 1973. The Ben Uri Collection also houses the smaller gouache study for the painting which employs a predominantly red palette.
In his Times obituary (21 July 1998), it was noted how Feibusch’s religious works exhibited ‘brilliant colour and a composition which is generally suave and classical, often lyrical: he was a man who valued warmth and passions in religion, knew how to project joy and sorrow in his painting, sorrow for European conflict being for many decades a keenly felt emotion’.
